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The Council of University of California Faculty Associations, an umbrella group representing faculty bodies throughout the UC system, has released a statement “in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere” and is urging UC faculty to endorse that statement on an individual and collective basis.
OWS, they say, “aims to bring attention to the various forms of inequality – economic, political, and social – that characterize our times, that block opportunities for the young and strangle the hopes for better futures for the majority while generating vast profits for a very few.” The statement ends with a call for “all members of the University of California community to lend their support to the peaceful and potentially transformative movement.”
Good stuff. But it stands in stark contrast to CUCFA’s silence on the student protests that have been sweeping the UC system for more than two years, and its timidity in addressing the root causes of those protests.
The current wave of UC student agitation began in earnest in the fall of 2009, sparked by plans for huge tuition hikes in the system. In November of that year, one week before the Regents’ fee hike vote, CUCFA called for a “postponement” of the vote to ensure “transparency, accountability, and fair consideration of other options” in the decision-making process. They did not oppose the hike itself.
CUCFA was silent the following month when sixty-six Berkeley students were arrested in the course of a peaceful, non-disruptive occupation on campus, and they remained silent throughout the wave of protest and repression that followed. In November 2010 they expressed “concern” about an incident in which a UC police officer drew a gun on student protesters and the UC system lied about why, but they released no statement condemning the incident and took no action in opposition to it. They remained silent as well as student activists’ due process rights were violated in campus judicial proceedings
The University of California has engaged in a massive campaign of intimidation, disruption, and physical violence against student activists since 2009, and CUCFA has — as far as can be determined from their own website’s archive of their public statements — never once stood up in support of the students’ protests or in opposition to those protests’ suppression.
Is this OWS endorsement a first step toward a new CUCFA policy?
One can only hope.
Youth culture scholars Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick have a thought-provoking op-ed in today’s New York Times, one that challenges a lot of the assumptions teachers and parents bring to bullying discussions.
High school students, they’ve found, rarely use the word bullying to describe even the most obvious examples of such behavior. Instead, they — particularly girls — dismiss it as “drama.”
Dismissing a conflict that’s really hurting their feelings as drama lets teenagers demonstrate that they don’t care about such petty concerns. They can save face while feeling superior to those tormenting them by dismissing them as desperate for attention. Or, if they’re the instigators, the word drama lets teenagers feel that they’re participating in something innocuous or even funny, rather than having to admit that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Drama allows them to distance themselves from painful situations.
Adults want to help teenagers recognize the hurt that is taking place, which often means owning up to victimhood. But this can have serious consequences. To recognize oneself as a victim — or perpetrator — requires serious emotional, psychological and social support, an infrastructure unavailable to many teenagers. And when teenagers like Jamey do ask for help, they’re often let down.
No student wants to be identified as a victim. And so…
Antibullying efforts cannot be successful if they make teenagers feel victimized without providing them the support to go from a position of victimization to one of empowerment. When teenagers acknowledge that they’re being bullied, adults need to provide programs similar to those that help victims of abuse. And they must recognize that emotional recovery is a long and difficult process.
Boyd and Marwick highlight a fundamental contradiction in anti-bullying campaigns. Adult rhetoric treats bullying as serious business, but adults in positions of power in such environments rarely exercise that power in ways that back up that rhetoric.
Adults: think back to the worst example of bullying you experienced or witnessed in high school. Now imagine that behavior taking place in a workplace, an adult social setting, a college classroom. Imagine how it would be addressed in such a context. The gap between what you imagine and what you saw in high school is the gap between society’s rhetoric on bullying and students’ reality. And in most cases that gap is vast.
In an op-ed in today’s Guardian, a British advocate for young criminal offenders reports that after August’s UK riots protocols for youth justice were tossed out the window:
“About a quarter of participants in London were under the age of 17, yet all protocol regarding youth justice was ignored. Youth services have worked hard over recent years to establish a rulebook for young offenders, designed to keep them away from the dangerous chasm of the adult justice system. Youth courts, specially trained magistrates, targeted assistance by youth offending teams, triage and assessment, social worker involvement – all have been slanted towards rehabilitation and welfare. This good work was overturned when young people were “herded” – another brave word from Greany – from police cells into the adult courts. Long sentences were imposed. Young people who might have been helped to live differently are now in jails, dispersed all over the country to rub shoulders with career criminals and murderers.”
The faculty council of New York City’s Brooklyn College has unanimously condemned NYPD’s spying on their campus’s Muslim student organization, saying it has a “chilling effect” on academic freedom.
Documents made public earlier this month indicate that the New York Police Department has been monitoring Muslim student groups at seven local colleges – City, Baruch, Queens, Brooklyn, LaGuardia Community College and St. John’s. At Brooklyn and Baruch, the department sent undercover police officers to spy on the groups directly. St. John’s college is private, while the rest of those targeted are part of the City University of New York.
The NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim organizations was undertaken in concert with the CIA, whose inspector general is now investigating whether the Agency’s involvement violated the law.
The Brooklyn College resolution said that the faculty “opposes surveillance activities by the NYPD and affiliated agencies on our campus either directly or through the use of informants for the purposes of collecting information independent of a valid and specific criminal investigation,” and called on the college’s administration to reveal “their knowledge of or involvement in this surveillance and information gathering.”
Brooklyn College president Karen Gould, who took office in 2009, said the NYPD had not informed her administration of its spying.
In CEO’s report on racial disparities in UW admissions, they highlight an extremely misleading statistical concept — that of “odds ratios” — to leave the false impression that black and Latino applicants to UW are hundreds of times more likely to win acceptance than whites. They also dump more than a thousand students of color out of their applicant sample, inflating admissions percentages for blacks and Latinos by excluding weak and unqualified applicants from that pool and distorting statistics on Asians by excluding all applicants of Southeast Asian origin from their study.
In addition to all that, they engage in a variety of petty manipulations of data, as when they scale their admissions rates chart to begin at 50% rather than 0%, thus dramatically enhancing the visual impact of the graph at the expense of accuracy and readability.
Strangely missing in all this statistical sleight-of-hand is any straightforward statement of the magnitude of the supposed advantage that black and Latino applicants have over whites. At no point in the report do they compare — for instance — the chances of admission of two students, each at the midpoint of the applicant pool, one white, one black. (Neither do they directly compare the chances of admissions of students by criteria other than race under which white applicants have a structural advantage — those of legacy admits vs. non-legacies, for instance.)
At one point they inch toward such a comparison, with a chart listing the number of students of various races rejected with SATs or ACT scores and class rank higher than the median black admittee, but since that chart fails to list how many students in that category were accepted from each race, it’s impossible to translate the chart into actual comparative data.
In fact, there is only one section of their report in which they offer a direct comparison of the chances of admission of two groups of students, and it’s a comparison whose terms have been cherry-picked to provide the impression that they are hoping to leave.
In the report’s section on “Probabilities of Admission” they provide a chart comparing the chances of admission for groups of white, black, Latino, and Asian students — one chart each for in-state and out-of-state applicants. So far so good.
But each chart compares only a small sliver of the actual applicant pool. Beyond the exclusions I mentioned in previous posts, these charts leave out female applicants, who represent well over half of total applicants. They leave out the substantial fraction who took the SAT rather than the ACT. They leave out all legacies, a mostly white group with significant advantages in the admissions process. And as in the previous chart they set the bar for comparison at the median ACT score for black admittees.
There’s a basic principle in statistics that the farther away from the middle you get, the weirder your numbers are going to turn out. If you compare the chances of two students near the middle of the pack, you’re going to get stats on their odds of admission that reflect the fact that they’re similarly situated. But if you go looking for outliers, things start to get wacky.
To understand how this works, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that only one student whose first and last names both begin with the letter Z was admitted to Wisconsin in a particular year, and that this student happened, by chance, to have the second-worst grades and test scores of the entire entering class. Of all those students whose numbers were worse, only one was admitted, while 2000 were turned down. And among those 2000, by coincidence, there was a second student with a ZZ name.
Among ZZ-named students with grades and test scores as bad as or worse than our admittee, then, one out of two was admitted, giving that group odds of admission of one in two, or 50%. Among non-ZZ students with similar grades and test scores, only one in 2000 was admitted, giving admission odds of 0.05%. ZZ-named students at that grade/score level, in other words, were one thousand times more likely to be admitted than non-ZZs.
And what does this tell us? Pretty much nothing. If that ZZ student happened to be 100th from the bottom rather than second, the exact same formula would show that ZZs had odds twenty times better than non-ZZs, instead of a thousand times better. One-hundredth from the bottom and second are damn near identical in terms of actual numbers, but we’re so far out on the statistical distribution tail that even a slight change in real-world data produces huge swings in the reported odds.
The folks at CEO understand this. They understand that because the vast majority of UW’s applicants are white, and because black applicants tend to have somewhat lower test scores, choosing the black admittees’ median as your starting point will produce more dramatic contrasts than using the median of all applicants. They also understand that the smaller you make the pool, the more random variation you get. And so they made the pool small and unrepresentative.
To be clear, I don’t know what the numbers would look like if CEO were to crunch the data in a useful way. I don’t know how many times more likely to gain admission a black or Latino applicant with an application at the middle of the total pool would be than a white student with identical numbers. I suspect that such a student would have a considerable advantage.
But here’s the thing. CEO does know the answer to this question. They do have the data. They know what admissions rates look like if you compare students of different races from the middle of the pack, just as they know what the plain-language version of their misleading “odds ratio” claim would be.
They know all this stuff. They’re just choosing not to share.
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